Category: Artwork + Stationery

This snowy, rainy, hailing week of spring, we added some structure to our newly hand-renovated organic garden.  A line of five baby Dwarf Mugo Pines was spaced out into the front border.  They will grow up with three Japanese boxwoods, daffodils, tulips, and a spreading carpet of bee-loving thyme and alba periwinkle flowers.  More lavender will dot in here later.  These candle cone cuties are slow growing and can be annually shaped or left wild to sprawl.  We’re excited for these pretty pines to be a layered part of our cosy winter garden.  They will bolster up summer blooms as well.  After the snow melts down, enhancing the soil, we’ll be doing our big spring garden tidy up, editing, pruning, and more planting.  I’ll add some archival garden-themed fine art photography prints to my shop this year, too!

A plan for more drought-tolerant evergreens is on our list of homey to do’s for our sustainably re-designed Rose Cottage.  I will post about all the changes we’ve made to the gardens.  It was a massively overgrown mess before we enacted the ‘right plant right place’ practice here, taking it all down first.  Always do your research before planting.  What is your zone?  What is the expected size the plant could grow to?  Colours?  Textures? Number? Layers? Pollinators & wildlife?  There are many things to consider.  How far from the house is a good distance?  You want to be able to age gracefully with your garden, making it as effortless as possible to care for, while enjoying the biggest amount of relaxation from your patch of healing earth.

These are mad expensive times, so it will take more time to build up privacy screening with taller plants, such as junipers, Italian cypress, thujas, and more spruce trees.  These more deer-resistant types reduce the gamble of plant care.  There is so much less green in the world for wildlife to roam through now.  We love animals to visit us, but we also care for our plants and don’t wish for branches to be nibbled right up come springtime.  We have been covering our new shrubs in burlap, which helps to protect them as they grow.  The long drive home from the nearest nursery is odd when one is seeing so many trees, just there…and our pockets feel skint.  We understand the care and cost involved with growing, but still…it’s mad times for buying plants, or anything really.  We recently divided up our house plants and more than doubled the potted plant amounts.  We plan to take lots of cuttings to get started on growing more green air for our property, especially with our Mediterranean plants.  Lavender and pollinators everywhere, please!

Happy Spring Gardening whether on your windowsill, balcony, yard, or field.  Love, ~ Amor Milagre

Pollution Awareness:

We added three of the Dwarf Mugo Pines to this little front stone bed, recently designed to be a mini potager, a kitchen herb garden, as we have just finished our new kitchen in this area of the house.  The new terribly smokey/loud unrelenting pollutive neighbours have poisoned this possibility.  We’ll soon have to move the herbs, such as a thriving rocky row of sage, into the less sunny back garden soon.  It is most upsetting not to be able to fully finish, work on, sit with, study in, paint, muse over, and enjoy the massive scale garden renovation we began five years ago when we moved in (whilst also renovating our entire Rose Cottage interior).

*Give everyone peace, especially on their own property.  This easily preventable pollution needs to be illegal. If you smoke and listen to music, do it inside your own house.  Our food in the front garden is polluted and now inedible.  Organic gardening, and farming, only works if what is neighbouring you is not polluting your plants, soil, air, and water.  We cannot go out, open windows, breathe, run, be…or even have peace inside.  How…is this allowed?  We need exercise and air.  Their pollution has directly caused devastating health issues for our family.  Change laws to save lives.  Make sense.  Care.  Be kind.  Keep your own life in your own house.  Dreaming and working towards a home and garden of one’s own needs to be allowed to be enjoyed.  It’s hard work and expensive, every year.  I’ll post our garden before and after photos soon.  The changes have been great indeed.  We fight for our right to live every day, just as our neglectful world must.  Protest pollution on every scale.  Our earth needs protection and freedom to be.

We’re trying to grow healing peace for us…and for the bees here.  When in the garden, one desires to think of nothing, no one, but only nature.  That is healing, instantly.  Let go of what controls and pollutes you and everyone.  Live peace.  Preserve & grow goodness for all…this is true equality.